Dear Journal,

Aristotle believed in a soul divided into three parts: the rational, the spirited, and the appetative. Later on Sigmund Freud would postulate the same basic idea, except he called it the ego, the superego, and the id.

After reading this and The Screwtape Letters, I've come to understand human existance in a new way. The way I see it, our realities exist in our minds, and we exist in several ways.

First, we are sensory. We physically exist. This is the first level of existence. Second, I believe in the appetative, emotional level of our existence. The thrid level of existence that I believe in is our intellectual existence. This is the rational part of our minds, the part that is above impulses and capable of reason. What's so significant about reason is that it allows the human being to appreciate their realities.

I do, however, believe in a fourth component to the human experience. Uncle Screwtape referred to humans as hybrids, "half spirit, half animal". As spirits they inhabit the eternal world, and as animals they inhabit time, which means that they are subject to change, for to be in time means to be in change. This is evident on all three of the levels of existence thus acknowledged. Our physical experience changes. So do our emotions, and so do our conscious thoughts. None of these are consistent throughout a lifetime, and supposedly one could argue that a person is like a river, for he or she is never the same river between any two given moments. At every moment the person is a particular.

Yet, I believe in universal archetypes. Connecting a person and unifying him or her throughout all his or her lifetime is an archetype for the individual behind all of the particulars, a derivative that results in a constant. It is what makes the individual an individual, for like a true archetype if cannot be divided.

I call this fourth component of existence the spirit, otherwise known as the soul. it is apart from the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual. It's impossible to imagine, since I'm describing it through the medium of thoughts, which is using my intellectual mode and is like creating a diagram of a four-dimensional sphere with three dimensional clay.

Bringing synthesis to the separate idea of Plato and Aristotle, the spirit is both an archetype and a particular. It is an archetype for how it is a sound idea transcending the illusion of the physical idea. Yet, it is a particular because no two spirits are comparable or analogous, and they are each their own new idea.

The spirit is what makes people unique. It is more than just the accumulation of life experiences, the way bodily sensations affect the mind, the emotional patterns we follow, and the ideas that we have. It is more than just an accumulation of personality traits. In theory, if there were an infinite number of people in the universe, everyone would have a counterpart who shared his or her personality exactly. A person could even clone himself or herself and let the clone have the exact same memory, except they are still two separate people. Their realities are not the same. Ultimately, these two individuals still have the capacity to make different decisions if they only decide to.

The combination of personality traits is but an observation of the variables that surround the first three levels of existence. They work in unison with the spirit, but they are all separate from the spirit and from each other. As much as these individual components make a person unique, the spirit is what makes each person special. From this, I can say thus: The soul is more than the sum of its parts.

Your Honor,

Master Legious